World Malaria Day 2025: Reimagining the Fight Against Malaria

Blog post by Prisca Kweyamba and Lison Laroche

The 25th April, 2025 marks World Malaria Day – a moment to reflect on the successes of malaria interventions in the past, and an opportunity to recommit to eliminating this devastating disease.

Since the global community united in their commitment to end malaria in the 1990s, an estimated 2.2 billion malaria cases, and 12.7 million deaths have been prevented across two decades.

However, after years of progress, malaria cases and deaths are stalling. There were still 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 deaths in 2023 alone, with 95% of these cases in Africa. Malaria still claims a life every minute.

It is clear that a “business as usual” approach will not achieve malaria elimination. We urgently need new tools, including innovative genetic approaches, to change the game. 

Our programme, Transmission Zero, brings together collaborators from several institutions in Tanzania, the UK and Switzerland. Our goal is to offer a novel tool that can complement existing methods in order to achieve malaria elimination in Africa.

Our approach focuses on modifying malaria mosquitoes so that the malaria parasite that they carry can no longer be effectively transmitted to people. We are focused on disrupting transmission by preventing the malaria parasite from developing in the mosquito. Our approach allows the modification to be passed on from one generation of mosquito to the next, providing long term control of malaria transmission, with limited need for repeat interventions.

In our roles at Transmission Zero, we have had the opportunity to collaborate across both laboratory and field settings, strengthening skills and fostering knowledge exchange. During Prisca’s stay at Imperial, Lison provided training on key techniques including gametocyte inductions and mosquito feeding assays. This collaboration has continued in Tanzania, where Lison is currently working as a visiting scientist, actively engaging with local communities and researchers to support field and lab activities. Sharing expertise across different environments has been both impactful and inspiring, highlighting the importance of collaboration in the fight to eliminate malaria.

It is now time to reimagine the fight against malaria. By focusing on genetic tools, we can create cost-effective approaches that are equitable and scalable, to help address the challenge of eliminating malaria throughout Africa. As the WHO and RBM Partnership’s campaigns this World Malaria Day highlight, there is an urgent need to accelerate innovation by investing in research and development to deliver new malaria control tools, in addition to deeper collaboration between researchers, policymakers, and implementers to translate research into action.

Make sure to follow Transmission Zero on Bluesky (https://bit.ly/3ELbepp) and LinkedIn (https://bit.ly/45PDIpA) to keep up-to-date with our project’s research, as we work towards a malaria-free future together.